Keywords

Story behind the photograph

In less than 24 hours since I have published the proposal for “about microformat” to tag media on the Internet a number things become obvious. Firstly, there is a very poor understanding of the Internet as media platform in general amongst the creative community. Secondly, there is even less comprehension when it comes to the Internet indexing by search companies such as Google and Microsoft and subsequently how the search results are or can be formulated by these companies. There is also a third issue which confuses many people, namely proprietary tags associated with specific media, such as EXIF generated by modern digital cameras.

I will try to expand on these subjects in hope that greater level of understanding amongst the creative community will lead to a quicker adaptation of the about microformat proposed by me, or a development of an alternative tagging methodology.more

Keywords

Story behind the photograph

Would you know who took this photograph? When and where was this photograph taken? What is its copyright status? Would you know what it contains?

The answer is yes, because you can see it. However, when you look for an image on the Internet you relay on search engines such as Google or Bing which are BLIND and can only absorb textual content. Your greatest photograph or painting may never be found because of this shortcoming.

So, today I have decided to write something relating to the Internet and media. If you are a photographer, painter, composer or any other creative person you will know how difficult it is to describe your work on the Internet in a way for the search engines such as Google and Bing to index our work in a meaningful and relevant way.

Most of the search engines rely on the image (media) title and surrounding content to deduce what your published media is all about. Most often the end result is less than satisfactory. So, what if we could specify meaningful information to the search engines?

I hope this prepared by me and proposed microformat gets noticed, gathers some feedback and matures to the point where it can be submitted to relevant bodies to extend the functionality of the HTML markup.more